


just another graceless night

by heartunsettledsoul



Series: Forgotten Moments [17]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: and the rest of riverdale should too, beanie kink, betty goes to therapy, in which the author continues to project onto betty cooper, spoilers from the 3x01 sneak peeks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 11:36:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16240817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartunsettledsoul/pseuds/heartunsettledsoul
Summary: It’s a lot for being sixteen.Betty’s summers are supposed to be filled with making out on the beach and devouring everything on the new releases shelf at the library, studying for the SATs, and maybe getting a little drunk at house parties.She shouldn’t be waking up to panic attacks that her father has broken out of prison to strangle her or that Jughead gets jumped by the Ghoulies again; she shouldn’t have twice-weekly therapy, plus daily phone check-ins, shouldn’t have felt the need to take an internship with former-mayor McCoy in pivot away from her dream career so she can put criminals like her father behind bars, shouldn’t be picking out a dress to wear to the murder trial where one of her best friends is facing life in prison.or, the author has a lot of feelings about betty going to therapy and wholeheartedly knows this will not actually be portrayed in canon





	just another graceless night

**Author's Note:**

> in my defense I was already writing this when the still of Betty in the beanie came out, so you really cannot blame me 
> 
> this is also probably a bit of a mess. I'll just ...let that be.

 

To say Dr. Glass is a godsend would be an understatement. 

 

Some mornings Betty thinks her sessions with Dr. Glass are the only thing keeping her afloat. 

 

Just thinking that fills her with an immense guilt. She has a lot of good in her life, she has Jughead and her mom is ...well, Alice is trying her best. She has Veronica and Polly and her niece and nephew. Betty has just as much good as she has bad right now.

 

But even so: Alice spends more and more time resembling Alice from the upside down and then with Polly and the twins at the mythical farm, Veronica is trying to launch a business predicated on selling alcohol despite being underage, and Jughead is camped out in the woods with the other members of the gang he’s apparently responsible for. Archie is holed up in his house with Mrs. Andrews, trying to get out of murder charges. 

 

It’s a lot for being sixteen. 

 

Betty’s summers are supposed to be filled with making out on the beach and devouring everything on the new releases shelf at the library, studying for the SATs, and maybe getting a little drunk at house parties. 

 

She shouldn’t be waking up to panic attacks that her father has broken out of prison to strangle her or that Jughead gets jumped by the Ghoulies again; she shouldn’t have twice-weekly therapy, plus daily phone check-ins, shouldn’t have felt the need to take an internship with former-mayor McCoy in pivot away from her dream career so she can put criminals like her father behind bars, shouldn’t be picking out a dress to wear to the murder trial where one of her best friends is facing life in prison. 

 

None of it feels right, so Betty goes through the motions because Dr. Glass tells her to. She keeps her nails cut extra short and journals religiously and does everything her therapist suggests because Betty simply doesn’t know what else to do. 

 

“The only way around this grief, Betty,” Dr. Glass had said in her soothing, grandmotherly voice, “is to go straight through it.” 

 

And so she does. Sometimes Betty processes by writing it down until her hand is cramped, sometimes it’s sobbing to Dr. Glass, sometimes it’s by throwing herself into something entirely different. 

 

For most of the summer, that something different was working with Mrs. (soon to be Ms., if Kevin’s frustrations are to be taken as truth) McCoy. And now, with two weeks left of the summer and Archie’s trial starting soon, Betty wants for that something different to be her boyfriend. 

 

_Preferably_ her boyfriend underneath her. Or on top of, or behind, or any other variation. 

 

(And with the door to her bedroom open, in flagrant disregard of Alice’s rules. Because if Alice isn’t home to parent, then Betty is going to embrace her rampant hormones and let her her favorite beanie-wearing cad defile her in the open.) 

 

(Well, he’s the _only_ beanie-wearing cad she knows.) 

 

(And she’s happily being defiled. Repeatedly. And satisfactorily.) 

 

(Take  _ that,  _ Alice.)

-

-

Going to see a psychiatrist for therapy had been a logical choice for anybody in Betty’s position, after everything had imploded so gracelessly. Had Alice been the one to suggest it, things might have felt eerily similar to the months of freshman year when she accepted prescription bottles in silence, assuming her mother must be right—must only want the best for her. 

 

It had not, though, been Alice to suggest therapy. 

 

(In fact, Alice  _ and  _ Polly both assured Betty that the only kind of therapeutic healing she’d need would be from the kind, loving embrace of those at the farm. Betty gave a hard and fast no to that suggestion.)

 

The suggestion came, of all people, from Archie. 

 

“I just think,” he’d said, “that I would have been so much better off if I’d talked to someone after Dad got shot. When you bottle all of that up, it still has to come out—it’ll just be more chaotic when it does.” 

 

Doesn’t she know it.  

 

Betty had gone next door to comfort  _ him _ , given that _he_ was on house arrest and being charged with murder. Her lovable best friend had surprised her, offering some shockingly wise words and reminding her, “Big picture, Betts, you just dealt with a lot more than I did then or am now. It’s okay to want to talk to someone outside of it all.” 

 

It seemed logical. Betty _likes_ logical. So she let Mary Andrews refer her to someone—out of town and therefore out of Alice’s reach—and didn’t even put up a fight when Fred offered to drive her there himself. 

 

When he’d stopped her from getting out of the front seat, a hand gentle on her knee, and pulled her into a one-armed hug, she nearly lost it. “We all need help sometimes, kiddo. I know you of all people won’t want to admit or ask for it, but that’s okay. We love you.” 

 

His shirt smelled vaguely of coffee and wood chips, voice gruff with emotion, and Betty remembers that under his shirt is a healed bullet wound. He’d nearly  _ died  _ just a few months ago. 

 

So many people around Betty were dying or getting hurt and, in that moment, she clearly felt that reality for the first time. She marched into the doctors’ office, eyes full of tears, painfully aware that Fred Andrews was the best parent she knew. Betty felt safe knowing she had him in her life. 

 

Whatever Betty had expected out of therapy—confirmation or denial of her familial insanity, empty pieces of advice that held no weight in the topsy-turvy world of Riverdale, more medication,  _ no  _ medication—Dr. Glass defied it all. Prior to the first appointment, Betty combed through her journals and her investigation notes to compile a comprehensive timeline of the most relevant events, from Polly’s hospitalization all the way through telling her father she would never see him again. It seemed the most efficient way to handle things. 

 

Instead, Dr. Glass had waved away Betty’s folder, made her a cup of peppermint tea, looked her square in the eye, and said, “I don’t need to know what happened or what order it happened in. I want you to tell me the first thing that comes to mind when I ask you what motivated you to get up this morning?” 

 

“Jugh—my boyfriend.” 

 

Dr. Glass smiled softly. “Good, tell me about him.” 

 

And then Betty had promptly burst into tears. 

-

-

The crux of Betty’s current emotional state is, as Dr. Glass is helping her figure out, that she is terrified that the people she loves will be put in danger. 

 

What Betty does in response to this revelation, is laugh. Because this is Riverdale; her mom and sister are in a cult, her boyfriend is in a gang, one best friend is opening a bar, and the other is under arrest for murder. 

 

Everyone she loves is _already in_ danger.  

-

-

Betty’s most recent therapy homework is to share a journal entry with the person the entry is about. 

 

(The moment Dr. Glass honed in on Betty’s type-a drive and penchant for lists, she started the “homework” assignments. They could be as small as going for a walk or finishing a book. Sometimes they were heavy emotional work. But if Betty could cross it off a list, she would do it.) 

 

Given that her mother already took the liberty of gathering every single one of her journals and reading them, that part was done. Though Betty would be curious to know what the  _ true  _ Alice—not the equally ridiculous but not quite as conniving woman formerly known as her mother—thought about all the entries where Betty felt so suffocated by her mother’s expectations that she turned to self harm. 

 

Hippie Alice just thinks the past should stay in the past. 

 

Present Betty knows she has to deal with all of this sometime, so she may as well start now. 

 

Present Betty also calls Jughead the moment hippie Alice leaves again for the farm. 

 

Unfortunately for Betty, when Jughead shows up a few minutes later, he is bemoaning parental issues of his own. 

 

“I could punch my dad right now,” he says by way of greeting, swooping down to kiss her quickly. He rambles through the entire process of Betty checking the door’s locks three times, taking his motorcycle helmet and placing it on the entryway table (again: take  _ that _ , Alice), and leading him up the stairs to her room. She hears bits and pieces—“...just dumps this on me, no instruction manual, no advice…” “...completely checked out and won’t pick up his phone…” “...we’re just fucking  _ camping  _ and bouncing between there and Cheryl’s  _ mansion  _ and we all know I have no clue what I’m doing…”—and decides that maybe  _ he  _ can be her therapy homework. 

 

“Hey, Jug?” she calls from the edge of her bed. 

 

He’s still in her doorway, fidgeting with his beanie in one hand, removed so he could run the other hand through his hair in his nervous tick. When he looks up, he does a double take and the beanie drops to the ground. 

 

Betty’s move of peeling off her tank top and unhooking her bra while he talked has its desired effect. “Can we stop talking about our parents and the Serpents for now?” 

 

Jughead nods emphatically and dives toward her, pinning her to the bed under his lanky frame and rutting into her. Betty sighs into the kiss, relishing in the comfort of his body against hers, and his hands tangled through her hair. Whatever outside forces they may be dealing with, everything goes quiet when it’s just the two of them. 

 

That part, at least, they’ve gotten better at—not pushing each other away. If anything, they cling to each other in the brief moments they get to themselves. The urge to have him permeate her entire being is so strong right now that Betty forgets how mad she is at her mother, forgets that she wants to talk to Jughead about his Serpent involvement, forgets everything that isn’t his teeth teasing at her nipple and his hands sliding into her shorts. 

 

She lets him get her off like that, sprawled across her entire bed with his fingers working against her while he sucks bruises into the delicate skin of her upper thighs. Betty tugs him toward her when the continued sensation becomes too much and breathes an, “I love you, Jug,” into his mouth. 

 

Though the sentiment and feeling never once dissipated over the past year, they say it to each other much more now. There have been too many close calls, too many near misses, to let it go unsaid. Betty had naively assumed that the more they told each other, the less impact the words would have. 

 

(She couldn’t have been more wrong. Affirmations of love—whether via a text good night, or over cups of coffee at Pop’s, whispered into his jacket as she holds him tight on the motorcycle, right before idiotic moments of martyrdom, or post-orgasm—merely buoy the feelings.)

 

Jughead is in the middle of saying it back to her when Betty flips them over on her bed and straddles him. “I love y—ah, love you, too.” He’s only just finished the thought by the time Betty snatches a condom from her bedside table, reaches for him to roll it on, and slides onto him. He hisses in pleasure when she rolls her hips and mouths at his neck. 

 

They move as one, matching thrust for thrust and kiss for kiss, the silence only punctuated by the hum of the ceiling fan and mixed, heavy breathing. When Jughead slips his hand between them, Betty yelps and starts moving faster, chanting “I love you, I love you,” in an irreverent whisper until she comes with a cry. Jughead kisses her with soft pecks as she comes down, snapping his hips up into hers before finishing with a groaned “I love you,” of his own. 

 

Despite the heat and the tangle of sweaty limbs, they hold onto each other until long after the smell of sex dissipates. 

 

Betty is drifting off to sleep, relaxed by the patterns Jughead is tracing into her bare arm when he catches sight of the pile of journals on her desk. 

 

“Was Paperclips having a sale or something, Betty? That’s quite the stack of notebooks.” 

 

“Oh,” she flushes. “They’re, um, they’re all my journals. Mom dug for them because she thinks I need to burn away all the hurt of my past, or something hokey like that.” 

 

Jughead straightens to look at her. “Alice read your journals? Again?” 

 

Too exhausted by the situation, Betty merely nods. 

 

“I’m sorry.” He drops a kiss onto her hair and Betty’s heart flutters. 

 

(It’s never going to go away, this feeling of comfort and love with Jughead. Unless, of course, something happens to him.)

 

“Actually, Juggie, can you grab me that top one for a second?” 

 

When he leans over, the sheets drop and expose the slope of his ass. Betty has to fight the urge to drag him back to her and grasp it while he moves inside her. 

 

“It’s kind of okay that Mom got into them,” she starts. She fidgets with the fraying ribbon attached as a bookmark. “Dr. Glass wanted me to share one of my entries from this year with the person I wrote it about.” 

 

Catching on, Jughead raises an eyebrow. “Me? I’m in there?” 

 

It’s so classically self-deprecating of him that Betty has to laugh. “Of course you are, Jug.” With a shaky hand, she flips through the pages until she finds the date she’s looking for—the morning after Jughead finally woke up in the hospital, after the Ghoulies. 

 

“I’d like you to read this one,” she whispers. “I’m going to clean up because I don’t think I can watch while you do.” Gingerly, Betty stands up and stretches her cramped muscles. Before slipping into her bathroom, she gathers up their clothes from the floor, making sure to place Jughead’s beanie within reach. 

 

Though she’s impatient to talk to him about it, Betty does her best to give him enough time to read. It’s a lot for him to process, she knows. She thought he was going to  _ die,  _ she thought her entire world was ending; in the worst moments, she had wanted to wish herself off the earth as well. The time it takes to brush her teeth, wash her face thoroughly, and fix her ponytail seems like a good enough head start. 

 

She pulls on a pair of fresh underwear and one of Jughead’s shirts she’d commandeered, steels herself, and opens the bathroom door. 

 

Jughead is right there, waiting for her. There’s a look of vulnerability on his face that she hasn’t seen since the night he first told her he loved her. 

 

His beanie is balled up in his hands. And he’s crying. 

 

“Betts, baby,” he chokes out. “I am so, so sorry.” 

 

And then Betty is crying and he clutches her to him, her tears soaking through the shirt he’s just put back on. 

 

They stay that way until both sets of tears subside, and they sway slightly to a rhythm neither of them know. Eventually, Jughead pulls back to cup Betty’s cheek in his palm, swiping away at some of the remaining tears. 

 

The gesture feels so familiar to her, his hand tilting her toward him in a way where all she can focus on is his eyes. The blue is still muddled by unshed tears. 

 

“We’re equal in this, you and me,” he swears to her. “We are partners and I can’t promise I won’t do something boneheaded again, but I will promise that the good or the bad, I will not leave you behind.” 

 

It’s not swearing to stay out of danger, but it’s a start. 

 

“And in the spirit of partnership, this is me telling you that you’re the most important thing in my life.” Betty feels a small weight on her head and blinks, confused, until she realizes that Jughead is adjusting something over her hair. 

 

She blinks again and moves a hand to feel for it. Her hand meets soft knit. 

 

It’s his hat. 

 

“I love you so much, Betty.” On tiptoes, Betty reaches up to kiss him, too overcome to find any appropriate words. They hold onto each other, kissing without urgency, without a goal. Just kissing to be close to each other. 

 

When they break, Jughead tucks a lock of hair back behind her ear and rubs his thumb over one of the soft points. “I will never let you doubt how much I love you again. I swear.” 

 

With the object he holds most dear nestled over her head, Betty can’t help but trust him. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Beanie Kink, h/t loveleee (who, along with sullypants and canariesrise, egged me on to write this) 
> 
> we're back y'all! late nights from rapid-fire writing canon fix-its and everything! 
> 
> please leave a comment if you enjoyed!


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